Jamel Mims and The Supreme Court

Lost in all the election hoo hah has been an ongoing cinder in the eye of liberty in these United States:  Owing to the recent Supreme Court decision, Florence vs the Board of Chosen Freeholders, anyone in this country can be stripped searched once arrested.   

And we are not talking about arrests for violent crimes, or for suspicion of carrying a concealed weapon, we are talking about the 16 year old girl who rolls past a stop sign. Florence, in fact, was a Black passenger in a car. The police computer said there was an outstanding warrant for him, but the computer was wrong, and Florence presented a document he carried with him showing the warrant had been rescinded. No matter: he was strip searched three times the night of his arrest.

The court made it very clear the whole rationale for these searches is to protect the jailers, and to a lesser extent, to protect the other prisoners in the jail. But in the various opinions of the justices voting for allowing strip searches, the jailers were in danger, because you just never know what some young woman may have up her vagina.  No matter the statistics presented documented the almost vanishing rarity of any weapon being found up a vagina or a rectum. It could happen. We are talking the four horsemen of the security state apocalypse here: Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito.

Sheriff Arpaio, Who Arrests Citizens for Looking  Hispanic

Given this level of back up on the highest court in the land, the two bit bullies are unleashed. Oh, they've given us license to do just about anything!  And if you are 
Sheriff Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, that means to you can arrest people for looking Mexican,  or  if you are DA Brown of  Queens, NY, you  arrest Black men for looking "suspicious,"  i.e. Black.  And a Black man who confronts a police line, however non violently, well take that boy to jail.

It has long been recognized Gandhi would have become a simple number in Stalin's gulag. We ought to remember the man who protests non violently is appealing to conscience, if not the conscience of the police, at least to the conscience of his fellow countrymen. The reason Gandhi could succeed is there were newspapers in Britain and they have Prime Minister's questions in parliament and with that kind of responsive democracy, an appeal to conscience could work.

I'm not sure Gandhi would have fared much better in Arizona, or in South Carolina, or in Alabama, or in Mississippi--or apparently in New York City--than he would have fared in Stalin's Soviet state. In fact, in Stalin's Soviet State, the main offense was to question Stalin; it was not a racial thing. 

Here,in America, or at least in some parts of America you don't have to say or do anything; it's all about what you look like.  But if you look not white and you protest, well, that's a guarantee, make your reservation for a suite at the Queens jailhouse.

In the case of Jamel Mims, the question is open whether or not his countrymen will be offended enough to rise to his defense.  It remains to be seen whether or not Jamel Mims's countrymen are moved to action by the prospect of a police state in New York City. 

It reminds me of that wonderful closing scene in Nashville, where the pixie who has been trying to get onstage to belt out her song finally gets to let loose: But what she sings is, "It don't bother me. It don't bother me. You may say, that I ain't free, but it don't bother me."

Jamel Mims Prostests Indiscriminate Stop and Search In Queens, New York